I would say the biggest positive is that when you remove social media, TV and commuting, and even the need to have a job – because you can’t go to a job when you’re in there – you had a lot of time to do stuff for yourself. For example, I learned how to salsa dance, trained for and ran a marathon, lost 20 pounds (9 kg) and got back in shape, learned how to cook, got 150 pages of my doctorate written, and did a lot of funky t-shirt designs.

Ever wondered what the User Interface for controlling a Soyuz-TMA spaceship looks like? Thanks to Astronaut.ru you can download a training program, used by the astronauts, as a DOS executable, run it with DOSBox and try your luck. This is what it’s like:

If you want to dive in more, Slava Gerovitch at MIT has published an extensive set of information on the Russian space program in English, this is a good start at the computer systems by Yurii Tiapchenko. The level of knowledge that has accumulated in this is just mind boggling.

The most fundamental unit of a character is the “stroke.” Think of a stroke as a single motion during which the writer does not lift her writing implement. The character for “two” is 二 and, intuitively, contains exactly two strokes. A more complicated character is 灣, the wan in Taiwan, which is made up of 25 strokes.

These strokes come together to form the 214 “radicals” of Chinese. These are usually components contained within larger characters, and each has its own meaning, like “water” (氵) or “fur” (毛) or “speech” (言). A character is usually one or more radicals—which give it meaning—along with other parts that suggests how it should be pronounced. You might notice that the wan (灣) character mentioned above contains the “water” radical on its left side; that’s because this character means “bay,” which is a very watery thing.

I rarely read long articles on the internet, but I read this one line by line.

In this post Phi Dinh explains how one can procedurally create interesting looking dungeons, ie. random sized, unevenly distributed rooms, that have main hubs, interesting to explore, are connected, reachable etc. Here it is simulated in an animgif:

His prototype (requires Flash) that generates a new dungeon every time it runs is also interesting to observe. What is the next step after you have a nicely playable dungeon? You make a game out of it, of course! Here is the end result, TinyKeep, a Diablo-style hack-and-slash game:

Back to the dungeon generation: how does it work? It generates a bunch of rectangles at random places at random sizes (which, in itself isn’t even that easy than it sounds), then comes the physics engine: “simply add solid physics bodies to match each room’s position and then just run the simulation until all bodies go back to sleep”. And so forth, this was just the warm up. 🙂

TinyKeep started as a Kickstarter project. It’s worth reading through the project page, there is an AI tryout section for the game. Even if you’re not a game developer, it’s still fascinating stuff!

Here is a bzip2 file of 420 bytes that uncompresses to a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if represented as a pixel buffer of 3 bytes per pixel, takes about 141.4 GB.